OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
From zero to figure hero. A checklist for designing scientific data visualizations
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Biological research spans scales and methodologies, generating complex data visualizations such as images, text, numbers, networks, and maps. With increasingly large and multimodal datasets, effective visualization is essential for efficiently conveying scientific insights. Despite this crucial role, biologist often lack training in data visualization and information design. This work addresses this gap by providing a framework for creating clear, accurate, and impactful visualizations of biological data. It is centered around a checklist that guides biologists through the process of developing publishable figures. The guide and checklist cover key aspects such as selecting appropriate display types, using color palettes effectively, and optimizing figure layouts to communicate complex data. Additionally, the work is supported by evidence from visualization research, ensuring that the checklist recommendations are grounded in established principles. By following this guide, biologists can enhance their visual data presentations, ultimately increasing the impact of their scientific findings on diverse audiences.
Efficient $k$-NN Search in IoT Data: Overlap Optimization in Tree-Based Indexing Structures
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2024
Year: 2024

The proliferation of interconnected devices in the Internet of Things (IoT) has led to an exponential increase in data, commonly known as Big IoT Data. Efficient retrieval of this heterogeneous data demands a robust indexing mechanism for effective organization. However, a significant challenge remains: the overlap in data space partitions during index construction. This overlap increases node access during search and retrieval, resulting in higher resource consumption, performance bottlenecks, and impedes system scalability. To address this issue, we propose three innovative heuristics designed to quantify and strategically reduce data space partition overlap. The volume-based method (VBM) offers a detailed assessment by calculating the intersection volume between partitions, providing deeper insights into spatial relationships. The distance-based method (DBM) enhances efficiency by using the distance between partition centers and radii to evaluate overlap, offering a streamlined yet accurate approach. Finally, the object-based method (OBM) provides a practical solution by counting objects across multiple partitions, delivering an intuitive understanding of data space dynamics. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of these methods in reducing search time, underscoring their potential to improve data space partitioning and enhance overall system performance.
Verification methods for international AI agreements
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

What techniques can be used to verify compliance with international agreements about advanced AI development? In this paper, we examine 10 verification methods that could detect two types of potential violations: unauthorized AI training (e.g., training runs above a certain FLOP threshold) and unauthorized data centers. We divide the verification methods into three categories: (a) national technical means (methods requiring minimal or no access from suspected non-compliant nations), (b) access-dependent methods (methods that require approval from the nation suspected of unauthorized activities), and (c) hardware-dependent methods (methods that require rules around advanced hardware). For each verification method, we provide a description, historical precedents, and possible evasion techniques. We conclude by offering recommendations for future work related to the verification and enforcement of international AI governance agreements.
Micro and macro facial expressions by driven animations in realistic Virtual Humans
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2024
Year: 2024

Computer Graphics (CG) advancements have allowed the creation of more realistic Virtual Humans (VH) through modern techniques for animating the VH body and face, thereby affecting perception. From traditional methods, including blend shapes, to driven animations using facial and body tracking, these advancements can potentially enhance the perception of comfort and realism in relation to VHs. Previously, Psychology studied facial movements in humans, with some works separating expressions into macro and micro expressions. Also, some previous CG studies have analyzed how macro and micro expressions are perceived, replicating psychology studies in VHs, encompassing studies with realistic and cartoon VHs, and exploring different VH technologies. However, instead of using facial tracking animation methods, these previous studies animated the VHs using blendshapes interpolation. To understand how the facial tracking technique alters the perception of VHs, this paper extends the study to macro and micro expressions, employing two datasets to transfer real facial expressions to VHs and analyze how their expressions are perceived. Our findings suggest that transferring facial expressions from real actors to VHs significantly diminishes the accuracy of emotion perception compared to VH facial animations created by artists.
Achieving AoI Fairness in Spatially Distributed Wireless Networks: From Theory to Implementation
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

We design and implement two variants of a practical random access protocol called WiFair, based on IEEE 802.11 and designed to mitigate spatial unfairness in Age of Information (AoI). Drawing on previous theoretical work, we modify the mechanics of 802.11 to fairly minimize AoI in a wireless network consisting of several update nodes and a single base station. We implement this protocol on a testbed of software defined radios (SDRs) and measure its performance under a variety of settings compared to standard 802.11. We observe a 32% reduction in network average AoI and an 89% reduction in peak AoI in a last come first served (LCFS) single-packet queue setting, as well as a 76% reduction in network average AoI and an 82% reduction in peak AoI in a first come first served (FCFS) queue setting when the network is congested. We further show that when the network is uncongested, WiFair achieves the same performance as 802.11, and we demonstrate its robustness to more bursty traffic by streaming live video.
ChartEye: A Deep Learning Framework for Chart Information Extraction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The widespread use of charts and infographics as a means of data visualization in various domains has inspired recent research in automated chart understanding. However, information extraction from chart images is a complex multitasked process due to style variations and, as a consequence, it is challenging to design an end-to-end system. In this study, we propose a deep learning-based framework that provides a solution for key steps in the chart information extraction pipeline. The proposed framework utilizes hierarchal vision transformers for the tasks of chart-type and text-role classification, while YOLOv7 for text detection. The detected text is then enhanced using Super Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks to improve the recognition output of the OCR. Experimental results on a benchmark dataset show that our proposed framework achieves excellent performance at every stage with F1-scores of 0.97 for chart-type classification, 0.91 for text-role classification, and a mean Average Precision of 0.95 for text detection.
Development of a cyber risk assessment tool for Irish small business owners
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are increasingly vulnerable to cyber threats due to limited resources and cybersecurity expertise, in addition to an increasingly hostile cyber threat environment at national and international levels. This study aims to improve the cyber resilience amongst SMEs by developing a national risk assessment tool. This research is guided by three key questions: 1. What current international SME risk assessment tools are available and supported or endorsed by national cybersecurity centres? 2. How can a risk assessment tool be created that is accessible to SME owners with little to no cybersecurity knowledge? 3. What are the key areas of cybersecurity risks for SMEs? To answer these questions, a comprehensive review of existing risk assessment tools was carried out. Through iterative collaboration with SMEs, the development of a user-friendly tool that simplifies risk for non-expert users was made possible.
Using Backbone Foundation Model for Evaluating Fairness in Chest Radiography Without Demographic Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Ensuring consistent performance across diverse populations and incorporating fairness into machine learning models are crucial for advancing medical image diagnostics and promoting equitable healthcare. However, many databases do not provide protected attributes or contain unbalanced representations of demographic groups, complicating the evaluation of model performance across different demographics and the application of bias mitigation techniques that rely on these attributes. This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of using the backbone of Foundation Models as an embedding extractor for creating groups that represent protected attributes, such as gender and age. We propose utilizing these groups in different stages of bias mitigation, including pre-processing, in-processing, and evaluation. Using databases in and out-of-distribution scenarios, it is possible to identify that the method can create groups that represent gender in both databases and reduce in 4.44% the difference between the gender attribute in-distribution and 6.16% in out-of-distribution. However, the model lacks robustness in handling age attributes, underscoring the need for more fundamentally fair and robust Foundation models. These findings suggest a role in promoting fairness assessment in scenarios where we lack knowledge of attributes, contributing to the development of more equitable medical diagnostics.
Trustless Distributed Symmetric-key Encryption
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Threshold cryptography has gained momentum in the last decades as a mechanism to protect long term secret keys. Rather than having a single secret key, this allows to distribute the ability to perform a cryptographic operation such as signing or encrypting. Threshold cryptographic operations are shared among different parties such that a threshold number of them must participate in order to run the operation. This makes the job of an attacker strictly more difficult in the sense that they would have to corrupt at least a threshold number of parties to breach the security. Most works in this field focus on asymmetric-key schemes that allow threshold signing or decrypting. We focus on the symmetric-key setting, allowing both threshold encryption and threshold decryption. Previous work relies on the presence of a trusted third party. Such a party may not exist in some use cases, and it represents a single point of failure. We propose to remove the requirement of a trusted third party by designing a dealer-free setup in which no entity can at any point obtain full knowledge of the secret keys. We implement a proof of concept of our construction in Python. We evaluate the proof of concept with timing metrics to compare to theoretical expectations and assess the cost in complexity of not relying on a trusted third party. While the setup phase suffers moderate additional cost, the encryption and decryption phases perform the same as the original algorithm.
Sparse Recovery for Overcomplete Frames: Sensing Matrices and Recovery Guarantees
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

Signal models formed as linear combinations of few atoms from an over-complete dictionary or few frame vectors from a redundant frame have become central to many applications in high dimensional signal processing and data analysis. A core question is, by exploiting the intrinsic low dimensional structure of the signal, how to design the sensing process and decoder in a way that the number of measurements is essentially close to the complexity of the signal set. This chapter provides a survey of important results in answering this question, with an emphasis on a basis pursuit like convex optimization decoder that admits a wide range of random sensing matrices. The results are quite established in the case signals are sparse in an orthonormal basis, while the case with frame sparse signals is much less explored. In addition to presenting the latest results on recovery guarantee and how few random heavier-tailed measurements fulfill these recovery guarantees, this chapter also aims to provide some insights in proof techniques. We also take the opportunity of this book chapter to publish an interesting result (Theorem 3.10) about a restricted isometry like property related to a frame.
M4CXR: Exploring Multi-task Potentials of Multi-modal Large Language Models for Chest X-ray Interpretation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence, especially in large language models (LLMs), has significantly impacted various domains, including healthcare. In chest X-ray (CXR) analysis, previous studies have employed LLMs, but with limitations: either underutilizing the multi-tasking capabilities of LLMs or lacking clinical accuracy. This paper presents M4CXR, a multi-modal LLM designed to enhance CXR interpretation. The model is trained on a visual instruction-following dataset that integrates various task-specific datasets in a conversational format. As a result, the model supports multiple tasks such as medical report generation (MRG), visual grounding, and visual question answering (VQA). M4CXR achieves state-of-the-art clinical accuracy in MRG by employing a chain-of-thought prompting strategy, in which it identifies findings in CXR images and subsequently generates corresponding reports. The model is adaptable to various MRG scenarios depending on the available inputs, such as single-image, multi-image, and multi-study contexts. In addition to MRG, M4CXR performs visual grounding at a level comparable to specialized models and also demonstrates outstanding performance in VQA. Both quantitative and qualitative assessments reveal M4CXR's versatility in MRG, visual grounding, and VQA, while consistently maintaining clinical accuracy.
Making the Most of your Model: Methods for Finetuning and Applying Pretrained Transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

This thesis provides methods and analysis of models which make progress on this goal. The techniques outlined are task agnostic, and should provide benefit when used with nearly any transformer LM. We introduce two new finetuning methods which add new capabilities to the models they are used on. The first adds a recurrence mechanism, which removes the fixed-window sized constraint and improves the efficiency of a transformer decoder. The second allows masked language models (MLMs) to be used for initialization of both the encoder and decoder of a non-autoregressive sequence-to-sequence transformer, opening up generative applications of models which were previously only used for natural language understanding tasks. We also introduce two new techniques for improving the quality of predictions of any transformer decoder without additional finetuning. One, hidden state optimization, can be applied to any transformer decoder to improve the quality of predictions at inference time, especially for few-shot classification. The other, conditional beam search, allows practitioners to search for natural language generation (NLG) model outputs with high likelihood while conditioning on the event that the output is not degenerate (e.g. empty, repetitive, etc.). Finally, we provide theoretical and empirical insights on the divergence of model-likelihood and output quality which has widely been observed in prior work. These insights apply to any model which represents a distribution over text, and apply to language models which are not transformers or even autoregressive. We argue that the NLP community has, to some extent, misunderstood the implications of these findings, and encourage a point of view which has more nuance.
Beyond Uncertainty: Evidential Deep Learning for Robust Video Temporal Grounding
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Existing Video Temporal Grounding (VTG) models excel in accuracy but often overlook open-world challenges posed by open-vocabulary queries and untrimmed videos. This leads to unreliable predictions for noisy, corrupted, and out-of-distribution data. Adapting VTG models to dynamically estimate uncertainties based on user input can address this issue. To this end, we introduce SRAM, a robust network module that benefits from a two-stage cross-modal alignment task. More importantly, it integrates Deep Evidential Regression (DER) to explicitly and thoroughly quantify uncertainty during training, thus allowing the model to say "I do not know" in scenarios beyond its handling capacity. However, the direct application of traditional DER theory and its regularizer reveals structural flaws, leading to unintended constraints in VTG tasks. In response, we develop a simple yet effective Geom-regularizer that enhances the uncertainty learning framework from the ground up. To the best of our knowledge, this marks the first successful attempt of DER in VTG. Our extensive quantitative and qualitative results affirm the effectiveness, robustness, and interpretability of our modules and the uncertainty learning paradigm in VTG tasks. The code will be made available.
Rethinking Sparse Lexical Representations for Image Retrieval in the Age of Rising Multi-Modal Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we rethink sparse lexical representations for image retrieval. By utilizing multi-modal large language models (M-LLMs) that support visual prompting, we can extract image features and convert them into textual data, enabling us to utilize efficient sparse retrieval algorithms employed in natural language processing for image retrieval tasks. To assist the LLM in extracting image features, we apply data augmentation techniques for key expansion and analyze the impact with a metric for relevance between images and textual data. We empirically show the superior precision and recall performance of our image retrieval method compared to conventional vision-language model-based methods on the MS-COCO, PASCAL VOC, and NUS-WIDE datasets in a keyword-based image retrieval scenario, where keywords serve as search queries. We also demonstrate that the retrieval performance can be improved by iteratively incorporating keywords into search queries.
A Distance Similarity-based Genetic Optimization Algorithm for Satellite Ground Network Planning Considering Feeding Mode
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2024
Year: 2024

With the rapid development of the satellite industry, the information transmission network based on communication satellites has gradually become a major and important part of the future satellite ground integration network. However, the low transmission efficiency of the satellite data relay back mission has become a problem that is currently constraining the construction of the system and needs to be solved urgently. Effectively planning the task of satellite ground networking by reasonably scheduling resources is crucial for the efficient transmission of task data. In this paper, we hope to provide a task execution scheme that maximizes the profit of the networking task for satellite ground network planning considering feeding mode (SGNPFM). To solve the SGNPFM problem, a mixed-integer planning model with the objective of maximizing the gain of the link-building task is constructed, which considers various constraints of the satellite in the feed-switching mode. Based on the problem characteristics, we propose a distance similarity-based genetic optimization algorithm (DSGA), which considers the state characteristics between the tasks and introduces a weighted Euclidean distance method to determine the similarity between the tasks. To obtain more high-quality solutions, different similarity evaluation methods are designed to assist the algorithm in intelligently screening individuals.
Safe Bayesian Optimization for Complex Control Systems via Additive Gaussian Processes
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Controller tuning and optimization have been among the most fundamental problems in robotics and mechatronic systems. The traditional methodology is usually model-based, but its performance heavily relies on an accurate mathematical system model. In control applications with complex dynamics, obtaining a precise model is often challenging, leading us towards a data-driven approach. While various researchers have explored the optimization of a single controller, it remains a challenge to obtain the optimal controller parameters safely and efficiently when multiple controllers are involved. In this paper, we propose SafeCtrlBO to optimize multiple controllers simultaneously and safely. We simplify the exploration process in safe Bayesian optimization, reducing computational effort without sacrificing expansion capability. Additionally, we use additive kernels to enhance the efficiency of Gaussian process updates for unknown functions. Hardware experimental results on a permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) demonstrate that compared to existing safe Bayesian optimization algorithms, SafeCtrlBO can obtain optimal parameters more efficiently while ensuring safety.
Self-Improving Diffusion Models with Synthetic Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The artificial intelligence (AI) world is running out of real data for training increasingly large generative models, resulting in accelerating pressure to train on synthetic data. Unfortunately, training new generative models with synthetic data from current or past generation models creates an autophagous (self-consuming) loop that degrades the quality and/or diversity of the synthetic data in what has been termed model autophagy disorder (MAD) and model collapse. Current thinking around model autophagy recommends that synthetic data is to be avoided for model training lest the system deteriorate into MADness. In this paper, we take a different tack that treats synthetic data differently from real data. Self-IMproving diffusion models with Synthetic data (SIMS) is a new training concept for diffusion models that uses self-synthesized data to provide negative guidance during the generation process to steer a model's generative process away from the non-ideal synthetic data manifold and towards the real data distribution. We demonstrate that SIMS is capable of self-improvement; it establishes new records based on the Fréchet inception distance (FID) metric for CIFAR-10 and ImageNet-64 generation and achieves competitive results on FFHQ-64 and ImageNet-512. Moreover, SIMS is, to the best of our knowledge, the first prophylactic generative AI algorithm that can be iteratively trained on self-generated synthetic data without going MAD. As a bonus, SIMS can adjust a diffusion model's synthetic data distribution to match any desired in-domain target distribution to help mitigate biases and ensure fairness.